Feeling Innovative? NRA Accepting KI Award EntriesThe National Restaurant Association is looking for a few good innovations. It's now accepting entries for its 2009 Kitchen Innovations Awards, which will be presented at the NRA's annual Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show at McCormick Place in Chicago next May.

The awards program, judged by an independent panel of industry experts, recognizes products and services for uniqueness and the most significant benefits they deliver to foodservice operators. Winners each year are showcased at the NRA Show's KI Pavilion, attracting international attention.

Cool Dudes Ben & Jerry Test New Way To ChillBen & Jerry's Homemade, the Vermont-based ice cream maker, said it's rolling out a new retail ice cream freezer that's HFC-free. The company announced it received permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a test of the new freezers and installed the first 50 starting in late September.

The freezer uses butane as a refrigerant instead of hydrofluorocarbons, commonly known as HFCs. Due to the EPA ban on CFCs, refrigeration companies have slowly been shifting to other refrigerants, first HCFCs and now HFCs, which also are considered greenhouse gases, though less harmful to the environment. A consortium of companies including Carlsberg, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, PepsiCo and Unilever among others has been promoting carbon refrigerants in Europe as alternatives to HFCs. Unilever, which owns Ben & Jerry's, said it has 300,000 refrigeration units around the world that operate with carbon-based refrigerants like butane or propane.

The United States is one of only a few countries in the world that doesn't allow the use of carbon-based refrigerants because they're highly flammable. Ben & Jerry's will test as many as 2,000 freezers in the next few years under the program. If the EPA allows the use of carbon refrigerants to expand based on the results, Ben & Jerry's said, it would convert as many as 100,000 ice cream freezers across the country.

AWE Opens Faucet On Water-Resource Library
With the help of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Alliance for Water Efficiency has opened the spigot on a wealth of online resource materials concerning water use. The AWE's new resource library purports to be a "one-stop shop for water-efficient product and program information."

The online library contains sections on commercial water conservation; water rates and rate structures; water-loss control, codes and standards; drought planning; and numerous other topics. Materials include research reports, case studies and other resources that can help you make more efficient use of water in your operations. Information on water-efficient products such as low-flow toilets, satellite irrigation and other plumbing fixtures also is available.

FER Magazine Expands Smallwares Awards Coverage On Web
If you're looking for the latest in innovative smallwares and tabletop/servingware items, this year you can check out scores of them in competition coverage at www.fermag.com.

It used to be that Foodservice Equipment Reports magazine, our printed-paper sister publication, ran full coverage of both winners and finalists within its pages, occasionally being forced to squeeze what might have benefited from a bit more space. Then the whole works was available on the Web site, too, but sans photos. And let's face it, photos are important.

So this year things are different.

The November issue of the magazine itself includes all the big, glossy coverage of the 11th annual event, complete with writeups and photos of all the winners. The Web site coverage, meanwhile, is expanded. It includes everything that appears in the print magazine plus detailed descriptions and photos of all the finalists. It's a bigger, better package all around, complete with handy links that let you jump from section to section, depending on what you're looking for.

Check it out. Go to the home page at www.fermag.com and just click on the prominently marked "2008 Supplies Competition Web Exclusive" section right smack in the middle of the page. Then strap yourself in for excitement.